


mermaids, native to montana

by inkspl0tches



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, just ur usual on the run marriage fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-26
Updated: 2018-08-26
Packaged: 2019-07-02 21:43:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15805158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkspl0tches/pseuds/inkspl0tches
Summary: Dan and Elizabeth (not Liz, not Lizzie, Elizabeth) Hale are married on the hottest day of August, 2002, in the City Hall off the main road in Helena, Montana. The bride wears yellow and Neptune is comfortably retrograde. The moon that night will be peerless, sky black, and brand fuckin’ new.--prompt from anon on tumblr: Everyone always mentions mulder and scully being married but do we ever get to see a wedding? Or variations of their wedding? Literally anything regarding the day they said “I do” would make my heart melt





	mermaids, native to montana

Dan and Elizabeth (not Liz, not Lizzie, Elizabeth) Hale are married on the hottest day of August, 2002, in the City Hall off the main road in Helena, Montana. The bride wears yellow and Neptune is comfortably retrograde. The moon that night will be peerless, sky black, and brand fuckin’ new.

“It’s a syzygy tonight.” Dan had read aloud the horoscope and the classifieds that morning from the bed to make sure they weren’t married under a bad sign. Their rented room had whitewashed walls and knotted floors. At the heavy mirror above the dresser, Elizabeth was finger combing her cropped hair, lighter than he’d ever seen it. “You remember?”

“Hm.” She scrunches up her nose. “Seen any bottle blonde detectives around lately?”

“Yes.” He tugs on the end of her hair, rising from the bed and kissing her shoulder. “But she’s only marrying me for the spousal privileges.”

“Romantic.”

And bullshit. Dan and Elizabeth work at the Stop and Shop and the hippie boutique behind the Drive-In, respectively. Elizabeth gets up early every Sunday and drives straight into the horizon line for six miles before braking a hard right into the church lot. She sometimes goes in. 

When Dan and Liz (Elizabeth) get married today, in front of the neighbors with the sloping porch and their three gap-toothed kids, it will only be cause for demure celebration and a free case of 40s from the older couple across the street. The worst thing Dan had ever done was accidentally walk out of the H-Mart without paying for the bar of chocolate in his pocket. And since it was her birthday, and he hadn’t meant to, and she had almost succeeded in forgetting the day in the first place, the worst thing Elizabeth had ever done was love him anyway.

So. Spousal privileges no. Romantic maybe. They lock eyes in the mirror. The proposal had been humid and a little high, the moment as ludicrous as the idea, in the bed of a truck on a freeway 50 miles north. She sticks out her tongue at him in the reflection. 

“If you do that for too long the Wendigo will get it, Scully.”

She bares her teeth, smiles when he pinches her elbow before disappearing into the kitchen. He calls out, “A syzygy is also a pair of connected things, my love.”

When she’d said yes, yes, I’ll marry you, fuck it, yes, let’s get married, he’d given her a sip of his paper cup Coke, with the melted ice still in the bottom, instead of a ring. And somehow, still, over the watered down sweetness and the thin cold ice, she’d cried. 

This morning, her horoscope had simply said, _Good luck._

—

And later that night, after they stand in front of the justice of the peace and the sloping porch neighbors, he takes her in search of mermaids. Swearing sights unseen and ocular proof — she kisses him for that one, ocular proof, he always knew how to win her over — they emerge from the courthouse into blinding sun and make their way to darker spaces. He pays off her skepticism with aquamarine drinks and maraschino cherries until she abandons her bar stool to cross her legs across his lap in a corner booth. 

“Do you know why I wanted you to marry me here?” She gestures with a plastic pink sword, sweeping it out over their sticky table. En garde.

He looks around. “ _Here_?” 

The bar, the mermaid locale of lore, is poised to be tiki-torched. A slatted wooden stand-up runs against the outside perimeter with double paned windows peering out into a dyed blue pool. The whole place has a subaqueous quality, an inverse fishbowl effect. Three drinks in and it had begun to remind her of his apartment. Water-lit and suffocating. 

Hours ago, when they’d come in, there had been mermaids in goggles, weaving in and out of the sight in the port windows behind the bar.  _It’s a **dive** , Scully, do you get it?_ Now, close to three, one of the mermaids sits on the bar in a damp bikini top and a long plastic tail and has the owner light her cigarette.

Scully bites him on the shoulder. “I’ll divorce you, smart-ass, don’t think I won’t.”

“Already with the name calling. We’re only ten hours into this thing, honey.”

“Already with the name calling,” she parrots back, but gentler. “I forget what I was saying.”

“Something about wanting me to marry you because you could not for one more second live without me legally bound to you for the rest of our earthly lives.” She stabs him with the little pink sword and he collapses half against her, wounded. “And whatever comes after,” he amends, kissing her chin. “Even if it’s just more life.”

When the justice of the peace had said,  _’til death do you part_ , Elizabeth had laughed so hard she’d suddenly been crying. They did the rest of the ceremony while indulging a little unorthodox physicality, with her leaning up against Dan’s shoulder, his arm around her waist. Every thought in her head up until the point where they said _I do_ had been about bright white lights in the Montana sky. A hopeful, hard, useless glare that could have been the moon, but wasn’t.

“No,” she says. “I wanted to marry you here, in Helena, Montana, because I hate it. I hate it here, Mulder. You understand? I hate it because,” she pauses to finish off whatever sweet, icy thing is in the glass in front of her. Does he understand? He couldn’t possibly. She hates it because he was here and because he _was as gone as he’d ever been_. He would never have any idea. How cold. How unexpectedly bright. 

How she’d thought it was the moon but it wasn’t.

“It took you, Montana,” she continues, “but I got you back.” She grins, drunkenly victorious. Their vows were rote, this morning, prescribed both of them suddenly a little twitchy and red-faced, even with his arm around her, not quite facing each other. She hiccups, stabs the pink sword into a pile of napkins and turns fully to take his face in her hands. “I love you and I fucking won.”

Mulder blinks at her, glassy-eyed, thumbs her lips in a clumsy attempt, maybe, to catch and keep what she’s saying. “Scully,” he says. “Scully.”

That’s good enough for her, as vows go. She says, “Mulder.”  

Closing her eyes, she gets him tangled up with her, half on his lap in the corner booth. Through her closed lids, the bar’s tricky, wavering light is like the hull of a ship. Mulder not quite rocking her against him, still not all the way past her name. For an indulgent moment, she could imagine them on a ship. But this time it’s the kind that is held afloat in blue-black water, and if you looked over the side you would see nothing around them.  _Nothing_. For miles and miles and miles.

—

When they leave, the mermaid tells them congratulations, tells them their drinks are on the house. With the same beat-up Polaroid they’d used to take wedding pictures, Mulder snaps a shot of her perched on the bar, cigarette hanging out of her mouth. Later, when it prints, he will write ‘generous mermaid, native to Helena.’ Later still, it will hang like evidence on a cluttered wall in a cluttered little house, miles from Montana.

Oh, and the wedding pictures. Well - wedding picture. The ones of them outside the City Hall, Mulder in a suit and her in a yellow summer dress, red-eyed and grinning stupidly at the ground, the camera, each other, she’d sent to her mother. The test shot — one of them a little bit in motion, her reaching down for him to take a step up, palms out, his hands over hers and squinting up at her although the sun is coming from the other side — that one she keeps.

Outside the bar, because even forgotten old habits have a tendency towards resurrection, a zombie’s unkillable impulse, they look up. The Montana sky is drained of everything but stars.

Mulder reaches down for her hand. The wedding bands are real, heavy and slow to warm, even though the rest was fake. There’d been a safe, things he’d locked away — just in case — although if he hadn’t come back she never would have known. He didn’t leave any traces that she could have followed. He’d been more prepared to marry her than to die.

“’Til Montana do us part,” he says, even though he couldn’t possibly know, not like she did, not like she remembered in a bone-deep kind of way, like it had evolved her, taught her new and scarcer ways to survive.

“’Til Montana,” she echoes. 

She looks up again, just to check, and lets out a breath so long she feels her ribs release it with something akin to gratitude. Above them, it is dark without ripple or question. Above them, for the first time, the Montana sky  _gives_  a little, breathes and lets her have the moment. There is nothing to hope for and lose. There is nothing to mistake or mourn. There is no moon.

Mulder is in quiet, blurry relief against the sky. Tomorrow, when they drive for the state line, he’ll say, “Scully, I love you, but let’s never come back to this fucking place ever again.” 

And tonight, when she turns to him in full, she does not have to close her eyes against anything. 


End file.
